My first mistake at the Guardian came, agonisingly enough, in my first article as a member of staff, and remains memorialised on the internet to this day. My subject was not a theoretical physician, a note at the end politely explained, but a theoretical physicist. Ten years later, it still makes me shudder.
Still, I felt a little better about it when I saw the run that Apple’s artificial intelligence system went on recently. In its automated summaries of news notifications sent out to some iPhones, it asserted that Luigi Mangione, the man accused of killing the UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, had shot himself. It said that Benjamin Netanyahu had been arrested. It said that Pete Hegseth, not then confirmed as Donald Trump’s secretary of defense, had resigned. And it said that Rafael Nadal was gay. For the avoidance of doubt: he didn’t, he wasn’t, he hadn’t and he isn’t.
